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One of the frequent complaints I hear about 3rd Edition (and 3.5) D&D is that you have to play it with miniatures. “It was designed to sell them,” a friend of mine bemoans, pointing to Attacks of Opportunity as the most damning evidence. I’ll admit that I did consider AoO to be so difficult without some sort of physical tactical gameplay aid that I’d generally not used them — they are an optional rule, after all, being labeled with such words as “can” and “may” in the Player’s Handbook. But I decided to see if there were other options.

Some quick Googling led me to one other person’s opinion, and that person happened to be Monte Cook. You may have come across his name before, in the front cover of your Player’s Handbook or Dungeon Master’s Guide since he was part of the core 3rd Edition team and is an all-around awesome RPG developer. Check out what he says — his advice is sound, and I think that’s how I’m going to try to play the upcoming D&D 3.5e game I’ll be running before considering and investing in other solutions.

If that turns out to not work well, and the group decides not to revert to my previous behavior of simply ignoring AoO, I might give some of Fiery Dragon‘s counter sets a go. Cheaper than miniatures by a long shot, they still accomplish the goal of allowing everyone to see the tactical layout of the encounter.

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I find myself suffering again from one of my many character flaws that’s plagued me my entire life: Indecision. I’m still thinking about the D&D campaign I’ve discussed before on this site. It was primarily brought about by my waning interest in reading and learning about the Kingdoms of Kalamar campaign setting — the book had been sitting on my floor for a while, and every time I’ve tried to get back into it I’ve failed. This doesn’t give me much hope for the setting as a whole, as if there’s one person in a D&D group who needs to be invested heavily in liking the setting it’s the DM.

Maybe Forgotten Realms would be a bit more interesting. I’ve played it and enjoyed it in the past, and it certainly has no shortage of support. Or [Eberron], with its high-action, energetic environment and refreshing take on D&D-style fantasy. I was running these thoughts around in my brain, and I remembered a game I’d picked up a while back and had never gotten around to trying: Exalted. It’s a very epic, non-traditional fantasy game made by White Wolf, makers of the popular and gothy Vampire: the Masquerade. The concept behind it is that each of the players is one of the chosen of the mightiest of gods, the Unconquered Sun. This means that they’re significantly more powerful than the average mortal, and provides a high-scale level of conflict. In most games, characters start out having trouble defeating a small band of organized goblins; in Exalted, they start out having the ability to dominate entire regions of the world. It uses [White Wolf]‘s Storyteller System which I’ve found in the past to be easier to learn and use than the D20 System that D&D 3.5e uses. At least, I thought it was — having done some reading in the Second Edition Exalted main book, it’s far more complex than I remember it being when I played Vampire. Maybe that has something to do with the additional capabilities of characters, or maybe it’s just a more complex system for a more complex game, or maybe I just wasn’t paying attention, but I’m worried that it might be trickier to play.

So, this leaves me worse off than I was before. Eberron still looks intriguing, Forgotten Realms is as it always has been, Kingdoms of Kalamar is solid and boring, and now I’ve got Exalted to think about as well. Sigh. I hate being indecisive and flighty.

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In continuation of my discussing some of the different settings for the forthcoming D&D campaign, I’ve settled on Kingdoms of Kalamar. Read on to find out why.

Realism

Insofar as one can have realism in a setting where magic, dragons, orcs, and unicorns are real, Kalamar has it in spades. The world feels natural and normal, like it actually evolved, geologically and ecologically, throughout time. While it was created by an all-powerful, omniscient being — just like Kansas and Pennsylvania — it has natural history and science behind its design and current state. The folks at Kenzer & Co. who developed it had a good idea of how biology and ecology work.

Versatility

One of the more common traps that befalls some other campaign settings is the so-called loremaster effect. One of your players, or another person you know, takes it upon themselves to find out everything they possibly can about the game world in which you’re playing. With some of the more content-heavy settings, especially those produced by Wizards of the Coast, this includes lots of sourcebooks, novels, online publications, short stories and supplements in magazines… the volume of information can be overwhelming. For someone who’s interested in maintaining a game setting that’s as close to canon as possible, it can be quite a task to keep all this going and keep it in-line with your local changes; basically, the more content there is to worry about deviating from, the more content the DM has to track. With Kalamar, it’s a significantly smaller company producing much less content, leaving me feeling more free to institute the other third-party or home-grown content as I see fit, without having to worry about something else from on-high causing a conflict. Kalamar is huge and has big swaths of largely undocumented stuff, perfect for dropping in a little village that’s suffering from a local threat. But it doesn’t suffer from the downside of having a small amount of content — the content that is there is very high-quality, and there’s plenty written about various different, more densely populated or interesting, areas of the world. So if I want to have a highly detailed urban setting, I’ve got Geanavue, Loona, or Zoa, not to mention the fan-produced stuff about Bet Kalamar.

Religion

Kalamar has a rich pantheon of gods, with each having significant power in their domain(s). This really isn’t all that different from every other campaign setting out there, but gods, religion, and faith are more integrated into everyone’s lives. In a lot of settings, religion only matters if you’re a paladin or a cleric — even monks tend to be generic Kung-Pow ass-kickers in most worlds. Religion on Tellene is a part of everyone’s life, and while everyone generally tends to follow only one god, most people acknowledge the existence of the others, and will even pay homage to them for certain things (e.g. briefly say a prayer to The Traveler before beginning a journey). I also like that all the different cultures — see below for more on this — have their own names for each of the gods, in their own languages. It gives a very realistic feel to the pantheon.

Culture and Race

On Tellene, there are many different sub-races of each race. You could call them cultures or ethnicities, but they add a level of depth to what was a very two-dimensional system of heredity. Someone whose family hails from the southern island of Svimozhia looks different and has different traits from someone whose origins are further north, where winters are harsher and longer, and there’s less sun. They’re both humans, but they’re still different. You could have an all-human party and it would still be full of variation. Humans are the most populous race on Tellene by a long shot, in part because they reproduce more rapidly than the other races due to their shorter average lifespan, but also because they’re exceptionally resourceful, quick to adapt, and foolhardy. Elves, gnomes, halflings, and all the others still exist and can be found in abundance in their own areas, but humans run the show. I won’t let this impact the players and their choices in race — after all, parties of player characters are the very rare exception rather than the norm, so why should standard racial boundaries apply to them? — but it might come into play in their adventures. If most of the people in a small village have never seen an elf before, they’re certainly going to remember the elf rogue who showed up with his half-hobgoblin, halfling, and mismatched human cohorts; might make sneaking around kind of difficult, necessitating more careful planning.

Magic

Kalamar is what’s considered a low-magic setting. This means that if you were to find a small village in the middle of nowhere, odds are high you wouldn’t find any magic users or magic items. Perhaps the village’s most learned individual might know about some aspects of magic, but he or she probably wouldn’t be a magic-user, themselves. People certainly know it exists, and most are aware that it can be used for both good or evil, but magic and magic-users are still hard enough to come by in most regions of the world that they’re generally considered exceptional. Some places might look askance at magic-users, while others might not even bat an eye (especially in larger cities), so a wide range of reactions is certainly something that extensive magic-users should expect when traveling. Magic doesn’t permeate everyday life like it does in some settings, but it is common in parties of adventurers — again, they’re the exception rather than the rule — so it won’t impact the players much in terms of character choices.

Something else I intend to try with this campaign, since I’ve only ever done it with Vampire: The Masquerade, is role-played character creation. We go through the characters’ lives, starting at an early age, and I role-play with the players to determine the events that shaped who they are. For instance, by working out how they reacted when they were little to, say, an armed assault on one of the townsfolk where they live — hiding behind something, defiant yelling, studied scrutiny — I’ll get a good idea of who they want to be. I’ll draft that up in the form of a character summary, or even a fully filled-out character sheet, and go over what I think they’ve got. They still have final say over what is and isn’t an aspect of their character — it is their character, after all — and if they want to scrap the whole thing and start over by simply rolling someone up and applying the background later then they certainly can. I’ve found that this offers a good introduction for new players to how role-playing games work, and prevents them from having to know too many of the rules and options ahead of time. I’ll give `em the available races, the available deities, and the available classes to give them an idea of where they might like to aim themselves, but actually getting there will be their responsibility (and mine).

I’d like to obtain a copy of the Kingdoms of Kalamar Player’s Primer to share with my players, since it’s a lighter-weight background introduction to the world of Tellene, and I may put some content up here summarizing the world and its races, deities, calendar, and regions for them to read. That is, after I finish reading the remaining books that I’ve got to read.

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So I’m starting up a new D&D 3.5e campaign and have been trying to determine which campaign setting I’d rather run. The choices have basically boiled down to:

• Forgotten Realms, with a focus on the city of Waterdeep
• Kingdoms of Kalamar, with a focus on the city of Genavue
• Eberron, with a focus on Sharn, the City of Towers

Funny coincidence: Waterdeep and Geanavue were both created by the same man, Ed Greenwood, who is in my mind a towering genius of fantasy world design.

You may notice that all of the options I’m looking at are based in or around cities. I’ve found I tend to like urban campaigns a great deal, primarily for the wealth of options they offer the player. When any good you want or any service you require is readily available it means you can spend more time figuring out how to do what you want to do, rather than whether or not it’s feasible or possible. But, all three cities are positioned in areas designed to offer easy access to a wealth of other areas — subterranean, jungle, forest, water, etc. There’s also absolutely no reason other than convenience and roots to keep the players in any given place. If they find they dislike the city and want to go somewhere, then far be it from me to stop them. My job as the DM isn’t to restrict their choices so much as encourage them to make the right ones.

Let’s look at some of the pros and cons of each setting.

Forgotten Realms

Pros

• Exceptionally well-supported by Wizards.
• Large world, lots of locales and people for players to experience.
• Has been around for decades, so there’s an overwhelming amount of content.
• Standard-fare fantasy, which more people are going to be familiar with — a so-called “high-magic” world, where magic-use is rather widespread.

Cons

• Very expansive world means it can be tough to decide where to set down.
• Wanting to stick to canon can leave one feeling restricted.
• Can seem kind of bland and played-out since it feels a lot like LotR.
• The abundance of content can result in players (and DMs) who become Realmslore Lawyers

Kingdoms of Kalamar

Pros

• High levels of verisimilitude lend a very realistic feel to the world and its inhabitants.
• I like the “renaissance faire” kind of texture that the world has.
• Very cohesive, “realistic” setting.
• Very detailed and thought-through.
• Could adapt a large volume of third-party adventures and modules to the setting without feeling like I was messing with something whose contents were written in stone by Wizards like I would with The Realms and Eberron.

Cons

• Not a first-party Wizards product, so it’s not as well-supported.
• Somewhat bland in that it’s not quite as high-fantasy as Forgotten Realms or Eberron — it’s what we call “low-magic” like Greyhawk in that powerful magic isn’t all over the place.
• Not as familiar to me as the Realms — my D&D education was on Toril, so I feel like I know it well.
• Content updates have been few and far between for a while now, and I’m worried that the vibrancy and life that new content (including setting, rules, and adventure releases) tends to bring will be minimal, leaving things feeling stale.

Eberron

Pros

• First-party, so it’s going to be well-supported.
• New and different.
• I think the Action Point system is cool — it puts the hero back in heroics — but I suppose we could strip that out and adapt it to another setting.
• The environment and world is really quite interesting.

Cons

• Completely new and unfamiliar to me, as I’ve at least read through most of the Kalamar stuff and have been in the Realms for years.
• I personally think Warforged are dumb and only serve to complicate the party dynamics, especially when Clerics are involved.
• Not quite like what people think of when they think “fantasy role-playing.”
• Despite protestations otherwise, it does feel like they’ve replicated large chunks of technology with magic.

The bulk of it really boils down to what kind of feeling and environment we’re looking for, I suppose. Forgotten Realms feels like traditional high fantasy, with abundant magic, wonder, and power. Kalamar has a very realistic, historical feel to it, plus Elves, Halflings, etc. as well as magic. Eberron is like fantasy film noir — there’s an ample supply of sinister, the good guys aren’t always good, the bad guys aren’t always bad, and there’s always something new to worry about. I’m leaving it to my players to each decide which they find the most intriguing, and I’ll base my choice on their opinions.